Ellen Meiksins Wood - Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy

Acknowledgements have become so much a matter of routine that it seems necessary to insist that these expressions of thanks are more than just a ritual. I owe a continuing debt to Neal Wood, not simply for his support and advice on this single piece of work but for the years of discussion, joint teaching and co-authorship which have been absorbed in it. Perry Anderson deserves my very particular gratitude for the characteristic generosity with which he has subjected my work to painstaking and constructive criticism, in an effort to strengthen arguments with which he often profoundly disagrees. My thanks also to Professor Ernst Badian, whom I have never met but who, as editor of the American Journal of Ancient History which published the article (Agricultural Slavery in Classical Athens; AJAH 8:1 [1983], 1986) that forms the basis of she nor any of my other advisers and critics can be held responsible. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to the staff at Verso, especially for tolerating my anxieties; and to Glendon College, York University, for the faculty fellowship which helped me to complete work on this book.

Unavoidably, there have been additions to the relevant literature since work on this book was completed, and I shall simply have to live with the regrets occasioned by my failure to get them in time. There is one book, however, which I really must mention, the one major scholarly study of Athenian democracy to reach me in this dangerous period between completion and publication: Martin Ostwalds From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law: Law, Society and Politics in Fifth-Century Athens (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). The easiest thing to say is that this book (to my enormous relief) neither renders mine redundant since it examines the democracy in a very different aspect nor does it conflict with my own account; but I very much wish that it had been ready to hand as I was writing my book. Although I did not set out to trace the institutional development of Athenian democracy (just as Ostwald did not intend to explore its social foundations), my understanding of popular power in Athens would have been greatly enriched by his analysis of the process by which popular sovereignty was established, from the first stages of legislative control, to the most far-reaching popular control of the administration of justice the world has ever known (p. 69), and finally the subordination of popular sovereignty to the sovereignty of law when the democracy was restored after the oligarchic coup of 404/3. Certainly my remarks concerning the effects of the democracy on Greek culture would have gained much from Ostwalds discussion of popular sovereignty and social thought: for example, he elaborates his earlier study of nomos, demonstrating how changes in that concept and its increasing association with a notion of enactment, a beginning in time brought about by human intervention expressed a general trend in the fifth century to assign mortals a higher degree of control over their world reflected in the specific attribution to human initiative not only of the laws by which society is governed politically but also of its customs, behavioral norms, and, to a more limited extent, religious practices. Norms, which before Cleisthenes were thought of as having existed from time immemorial, now came to be regarded as having been enacted and as being enforceable in a way similar to that in which statutes are decided by a legislative agency (p. 93). I wish I had said that.

E.M.W.